University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Frame by Frame

Archive for November, 2011

Here’s an interesting list, with links to IMDB, of the “one hundred best directors” of all time, compiled by The Cine-club de Caen. Of course, all such lists are highly subjective, but this seems like a good place to start for anyone, and any list that contains Manoel de Oliveira — though ranked at number 73, much too low in my estimation — seems worthy to me. Worth checking out, if only for the links to IMDB, and thus the links to outside reviews, resource materials, and the like.

“At first glance, it might seem that a film about Picasso should have been directed by anyone other than Henri-Georges Clouzot, the famous misanthrope of the cinema. But then again, both were hard, violent men, absolutely sure of their vocations, and each approached their work with the same sense of absolute control and complete lack of compromise; whatever they did, it was entirely up to them, and anyone who interfered would be cut down in short order.

For Picasso, this was not the first cinematic exploration of his creative process; in 1949, the Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts made Bezoek aan Picasso (Visit to Picasso), a 21-minute film in which Picasso creates, as he does in Clouzot’s film, a number of drawings, painting on see-through glass, which the director films from the other side, to allow the viewer to see both the painting and the artist at work, at the same time. . .”

Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil is one of the greatest, and bleakest of all noirs. Made in 1948, just before Polonsky became yet another victim of the HUAC Blacklist, Force of Evil boasts a stellar cast, including veteran heavy Thomas Gomez, the always dependable Roy Roberts, noir specialist Marie Windsor, and is toplined by John Garfield in one of his most memorable roles, as a mouthpiece for the numbers racket who tries to make a quick killing, while keeping his brother, who runs a small time policy office, out of the way of the big boys. Based on the novel Tucker’s People by Ira Wolfert, and immaculately photographed by George Barnes, this is one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and ultimately horrific tales of greed, deception and betrayal ever brought to the screen. And it’s only 78 minutes long.

From Screenonline: “Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night (1945) is one of just a handful of ‘true’ horror films of British cinema’s first half-century, and certainly the most important film in that genre until the beginning of Hammer’s horror cycle a decade later. Released in September 1945, just a month after the formal end of the War, it marks a break from the documentary-influenced realism which had dominated wartime films, particularly Ealing’s.

The film was a truly collaborative venture, including many of the figures who dominated Ealing’s output during and after the War. Directors Charles Crichton and Robert Hamer, writer T.E.B. Clarke and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe represent the popular Ealing comedies; writer Angus McPhail was active at Ealing as early as 1939; Basil Dearden would pioneer the postwar ’social problem’ film; veteran Alberto Cavalcanti had already made his mark with Went the Day Well? (1943) and was a hugely influential figure at Ealing, despite directing only one further film there. Another studio mainstay, director Charles Frend, was forced to pull out early in the production due to other commitments. The cast included Ealing regulars Mervyn Johns, Googie Withers, Ralph Michael, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne.

Dead of Night stands up well despite the passing years. The linking narrative, directed by Dearden, holds the film together effectively, building up the sense of dread towards the suitably delirious conclusion. The five supernatural tales may be uneven, but Cavalcanti’s story – a talented ventriloquist is driven to attempted murder by his apparently conscious dummy – is eerie and gripping, and features a powerful performance by Michael Redgrave as the troubled and finally unhinged ventriloquist. Even better is the story by first-time director Hamer, in which an antique mirror with a dark history exposes the cracks in the relationship of smug middle-class couple Peter (Michael) and Joan (Withers).

The film sets up a classic horror genre opposition between science and the supernatural, and makes it clear from the outset which side it is on. Psychiatrist Dr van Straaten (Frederick Valk) is quickly isolated; his attempts to offer a rationalist interpretation of his fellow guests’ stories are dismissed and, finally, he pays for his scepticism with his life. Despite its success, Dead of Night was a dead-end for Ealing, which never really dabbled in horror again; the genre largely went back underground until the Hammer era.” – Mark Duguid

Edward Binns stars as a square John just trying to run a roadside tavern with his wife and kids, but soon the syndicate muscles in, and forces him to join the operation, and “juice up” the joint with rigged slots, “B” girls and endlessly flowing liquor. Soon — in an economical 71 minutes — all hell breaks loose. It takes a cheap, rotten film to convey a cheap, rotten universe, and as the film’s tag line screamed, “Not since [Phil Karlson's] Phenix City Story [a film about a similarly corrupt community in 1950s Alabama] has any film hit so hard…Now, see a vicious empire of vice and corruption blasted before your eyes! The year’s biggest film scoop! The Whole Scorching Story…BRIBE by BRIBE…SIN by SIN…SHOCK by SHOCK!”

Shot in less than two weeks in stark black and white, with cameos from Frank Gorshin as a sociopathic rapist, and Lawrence Dobkin as a smooth criminal kingpin, Portland Exposé, a low-budget effort from Allied Artists, paints a truer picture of the era than the glossy romances and musicals most people fondly remember as emblematic of 1950s complacency. Everyone is on the take, the sweet little old society matron runs the biggest prostitution ring in town, and all the cops are career criminals.

So incendiary was the film’s script that the crew had to rent film equipment in Hollywood, and secretly truck it to Portland, Oregon using non-Teamster trucks, as some of the Teamsters took a real dislike to the film’s depiction of labor’s complicity in the rackets. Add to that the almost neorealist rawness of the all-location cinematography and direction, and Portland Exposé emerges as one of the most authentic crime films of the 1950s, and well worth a look today for a arguably more accurate depiction of our supposedly halcyon past. And it’s out on DVD!

I’m not a Lars von Trier cultist by any stretch of the imagination — his previous work strikes me as empty and pretentious — and I say this only because with Melancholia, easily the best film of his career, he has created one of the the most heartbreaking, elegiac, complex and accomplished films in cinema history — in short, it’s a stop at nothing masterpiece, and instantly joins the pantheon of truly remarkable films, evoking everything from Dreyer to Bresson to Resnais and all the stops in-between.

The plot of the film is no secret; Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is a deeply depressed young woman whom we meet on her wedding day, afflicted with melancholia, the disease; at the same time, a huge planet, also named Melancholia, is hurtling towards earth at terrific speed, destined to utterly destroy the planet. All of this is revealed in the first five minutes, in a super-slow-motion montage reminiscent of the video gallery pieces of Bill Viola, culminating in the moment that Melancholia collides with Earth, as seen from distant space.

But after this opening, wordless sequence, scored to the strains of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the film leaves the apocalypse plot aside for a close-up examination of Justine’s disastrous and ruinously expensive wedding, during which Justine bit by bit collapses into a state of almost complete catatonia. Her sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), tries to help her through the day-long ordeal, but to no avail. By the end of the day, Claire’s husband deserts her, she’s fired from her job for telling off her obnoxious boss, and her mother, Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) stands up during a toast and tells the entire room that she hates the very idea of marriage, even as the forced festivities continue.

That’s the first half of the film, aptly entitled Justine, but when Claire takes over the eponymous second half of Melancholia, the film deepens into a doleful meditation on mortality, the worthlessness of property and money, the fickle stability of family relationships, and because the end of the film is predestined — we know from the opening moments that everyone in the film will die, as well as every other person on the earth — the tragedy becomes almost unbearably intense, as Justine pulls out of her depression, embraces the inevitability of death, and becomes, against all odds, the most courageous member of the group in the film’s final moments.

More than that I cannot and should not say; this is a film that simply must be experienced, preferably on a large screen for full visual and emotional impact. This is the sort of apocalyptic thriller that only an artist can pull off; it’s absolutely pitch-perfect for its entire two hour and fifteen minute running time, and like the rogue planet that dominates Melancholia from first frame to last, the film inexorably gathers velocity and resonance as it hurtles towards its horrific and yet transcendant climax. The entire cast is superb — Dunst gives the performance of her career in the film — and John Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, and all the rest of the ensemble are equally brilliant.

I spend so much of my time watching junk, which is all the Hollywood makes now, so when something as good as this, or Margin Call, comes along, I want to celebrate. It’s as Ingmar Bergman said near the end of his life; you see so many bad movies, that after a while, you don’t expect anything more. Then something like this comes along. Melancholia is an astonishing, absolutely remarkable film that succeeds on every level — as human drama, as science fiction fantasy, as social parable, as purely visual filmmaking. See it at once.

Richard Graham, an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in Love Library, has been assiduously putting together a digital archive of US government comics on a wide variety of topics, all available as downloadable pdfs from the ﻿UNL Libraries Image and Multimedia Collections.

“Richard Graham’s first foray into comic books didn’t include Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four or Archie but a 1979 Army training pamphlet for an off-road military vehicle: Operation and Preventative Maintenance: the M561/M792 Gama Goat [. . .] Graham, now a 37-year-old media services librarian and associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has made government comics one of the focuses of his career. A few years back, he began a project at UNL scanning and digitizing hundreds of comics, some of which were already in UNL’s collection, some in his own.”

A friend of mine who used to be in what is euphemistically called the “financial services” industry wrote me that J.C. Chandor’s low budget indie Margin Call “totally nails it” in its depiction of events leading up the 2008 crash — which is super scary, because the fictional traders presented in this film are the absolute scum of the earth. And these are our financial advisors? God help us all.

The cast includes Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker, and Penn Badgley; the film was shot for a mere $3.5 million dollars, and has received spectacular reviews.

While film may seem eternal, in fact it’s highly ephemeral, as this list of 75 lost British films compiled by the British Film Institute clearly indicates. Some of the films on the BFI list are from the 1970s, and one would think that films of such relatively recent vintage would be readily available, but no — they’re lost, negatives and all prints. In most cases, only stills and press materials survive. They may eventually turn up in a vault somewhere, or in someone’s attic or bedroom closet, but for the moment, these films are only memories — moving images that once had life, but now exist no more.

This list, in itself, is one of the best arguments one can make for the essential nature of film preservation. Without proper archival care, all films will cease to exist eventually. Our job is to keep them with us, as part of our shared cultural heritage. The films on this list are all British productions, but such a list could easily be expanded to include films around the world — films that are now just memories. Once they’re gone, they’re gone forever, and you can’t bring them back — so we must act now.

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him wdixon1@unl.edu or his website, wheelerwinstondixon.com